(ORDO NEWS) — It’s done! The eternal question, which has been discussed since ancient times, is finally resolved. Scientists can now say with certainty that the egg came before the chicken.
Now you know what to answer if someone asks you: “Which came first – the egg or the chicken?”.
The question of the chicken and the egg has been discussed since ancient Greece. However, scientists could not give a clear answer to it for a long time.
Yes, and this riddle did not yield to logical thinking: on the one hand, an egg is necessary for the appearance of a chicken, on the other hand, a chicken is necessary for the appearance of an egg.
The circle is closed. But scientists from the UK managed to get to the bottom of the truth.
The first came the egg, but not the chicken
Biologists have discovered that the eggs are actually female sex cells, previously they required reservoirs for reproduction.
However, over time, a shell appeared, thanks to which the eggs could be located on land. This changed the course of vertebrate evolution.
Interestingly, birds were first mentioned in the fossil record from about 165 to 150 million years ago.
But eggs, according to scientists, appeared much earlier – about 325 million years ago. This is one of the arguments proving that the egg appeared before the chicken.
But the first egg did not have such a hard shell, but a leathery coating. Outwardly, it resembled an egg laid by modern reptiles and platypuses.
What came first: the chicken egg or the chicken?
To a narrower question, scientists give a different answer – the chicken appeared first. Chickens probably evolved from a subspecies of the red forest bird about 50 million years ago.
According to a 2022 research paper, people living in Southeast Asia first domesticated these birds sometime between 1650 and 1250 BC.
At some point in the process of domestication, the last ancestor of modern chickens laid an egg containing an embryo with enough genetic differences to distinguish it from its parent species.
A chick hatched from it, which, as an adult, laid the first chicken egg.
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